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— Catchphrase of Tyreen Calypso, Borderlands 3, an in-universe instance of this trope

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You've heard it a thousand times. You're watching a video on YouTube and suddenly they ask you "and please subscribe to our channel", or maybe they tell you where their subscribe button is located since you could never hope to find it on your own. Typically, any "professional-ish" YouTube video closes with anywhere from 15 seconds to 2 minutes of screens full of flashing animated "Click Me! Click Me!" buttons trying to entice the viewer to subscribe and/or watch all the other videos in the channel, as well as exhortations to upvote and favorite the video. Apparently they expect you to favorite every single video in the series, which makes you wonder if they have a clue what the point of favoriting is.

This trope includes authors asking for you to vote for or donate to them, or any other time that authors are giving you free content, but then they expect something in return. This may take the form of wanting your promise to come back, your vote that their product is indeed awesome, or your hard-earned lucre.

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This isn't limited to YouTube. Many magazines, for instance, have full-page ads near the front begging you to subscribe if you haven't already, or subscription cards that fall out as soon as you pick up the periodical. Premium TV channels tend to have ads asking the viewers to renew their subscription. Of course, the trope starter might be PBS and NPR, who both use appeals and special programming to get viewers and listeners to donate to their stations to continue to provide the programming.

Not to be confused with Please Subscribe, which is a documentary of various YouTube celebrities including David Choi, Daxflame, Happyslip, and Tay Zonday.

Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?: In their more recent episodes, each member of the cast asks you to subscribe, not to the channel you're watching, but to their personal YouTube channels instead.

From Household Hackers we get such gems as this: "After we get through today's tip, you'll never again have to wander aimlessly from video to video begging for subscribers like the neglected latch-key child you are." Subtle.

Every episode of Mr Deity since the third season ends with a sketch in which Brian Dalton (sometimes in character) encourages viewers to donate and/or subscribe. In some cases these have been longer than the episode itself.

Nerdist channel's Neil's Puppet Dreams has star Neil Patrick Harris do this at the end of each video. In the first few, he made it a point to tell the audience that it's not his junk to which he's pointing.

Zero Punctuation has Yatzee mention this while ranting about the crowded interface of System Shock 2. In the video uploaded on Youtube, you can actually click on the text that pops up to subscribe to the channel.

They have since added a straight "subscribe" button at the end of each video, which they occasionally anthropomorphise as "Scribey" or comedically misspell.

When The Nostalgia Chick had Andre the Black Nerd on her Blip show, he instinctively closed the show by asking viewers to like and subscribe, saying that Youtube will violently punish those who don't include that message.

Ultra Fast Pony parodies this in the episode "Little Miss Montage". First, the characters blatantly compare the fashion show to Youtube: "This isn't Youtube. You can't just ask us to look at something and chuck a hissy fit if we don't like it." At the end of the episode, Rarity is very disappointed that the big-name fashion critic "liked" her dresses but didn't "favourite" them. Then the text insert at the very end reads:

Every time you like something without adding to favourites, a baby penguin dies. Think of the penguins; like AND favourite. Also subscribe or a piano falls on a baby giraffe.

SourceFed fans can recite it- "Please like and subscribe and click this annotation here for more videos." It's at the end of every video. They make five videos a day Monday-Thursday.

Did You Know Gaming ends every video not only with a request to subscribe to their channel, but also the personal channel of whomever is providing the narration for the video in question (with varying degrees of eloquency).

Markiplier closes out his Youtube videos by pointing out other videos and his annotations, but this trope also became a Running Gag in his Drunk Minecraft series with Bob and Wade, wherein viewers are encouraged to "like favorite and subscribe if X" where X could be anything.

At the end of every episode of Russell Brand's web show The Trews, he will finish the topic of the day and will say with the same breath; "That's some Trew News, subscribe here."

Stampylonghead'sLet's Cress channel parodies this by obscuring key parts of videos with 'Like The Video!!!' text, which flies onscreen with an increasingly long and ridiculous whooshing sound each time. At the end of a video, he also asks people to subscribe, and share the video on Facebook and MySpace.

Parodied on The Late Late Show with James Corden, where his discussion about the show's new website YourMomMassagesMe.com turned into a ticket plug, which turned into an Overly Long Gag where he listed off every single social network he was supposedly on.

James: You can Do-Re-Mi on Fa-So-La-Ti-Do. Make your mom proud on J-Date. You can eat me on Uber Eats. You can work-work-work me on Rihannster. You can twerk-twerk-twerk me on Twerkster.

Inverted by EmperorLemon, who frequently asks people who dislike his newer content (especially those who only subscribed his channel for his Pixar poops) to unsubscribe.

Louder With Crowder: At the end of every video, Crowder snarkily asks viewers to subscribe to his channel, leave an angry comment, or join the "mug club" (a members area granting access to more content and a hand-etched coffee mug with the show's logo).

The official YouTube uploads have the following in their descriptions: "Follow us and watch the latest animations of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf."

Several of the official YouTube uploads end with Weslie pointing to the subscribe button and Wolffy pointing to more videos.

Rabbid Luigi often injects this into his episodes in a comedic fashion, like claiming the God Mode cheat of Doom also causes cryptic messages to rain down that tell you to "subscribe and ring the bell icon". As an example of Tropes Are Not Bad, the comments are usually full of people lauding the way he put it in the episode.

Every episode of Adam Buxton's podcast ends with a song that repeatedly asks the listener to "like and subscribe", which Cyriak turned into a distinctly disturbing animation of hundreds of hairy Buxton-creatures literally feeding "like" and "subscribe" buttons to their hairy god-creature.

The Critical Drinker used to end videos with the standard "like & subscribe" request, but according to a Q&A, he eventually decided it was cliche and unnecessary, since it rarely persuades viewers who don't care to subscribe. His new signoff is a terse "Anyway, that's all I have for today. Go away now!"

Examples of Please Vote:

YouTube used to host contests which used the video rating system (the "five stars" system at first, then the "thumbs up/down" system which replaced it) as a way of tallying "votes". The page that listed those contests has since disappeared in one of YouTube's many redesigns.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal used to offer an early look at tomorrow's comic, and a one-panel extra that showed what happened after the end of the current comic if you voted for the site. The former was phased out, and the latter was changed so that you only had to hover your mouse over a red button to access, although it's still often referred to as the "votey comic" anyway.

The LittleBigPlanet comment function is never used to comment on the relevant level, but instead consists entirely of people begging you to play and heart their levels. This tendency was parodied in the Metal Gear Solid level pack, where Liquid Ocelot's evil plan was to flood LBP with generic levels encouraging people to heart him so he can become the most popular player.

"Please rate this app" is used in so many iPhone applications (apps) that it's become a Stock Phrase.

Some episodes of Ninja the Mission Force end with either Gordon being called by either Gordon or himself asking how they can support the show, he tells them to share their favourite episodes, etc. and acts like it's no big deal who just phoned him.

"Plz Vote" or some variant thereof is a common sight on most Powder Game uploads. It can also be found on Powder Toy saves.

Happy Wheels is notorious for levels that include a demand/plea (either in the level description or in the level itself) to rate 5, regardless of the quality of the level. Some players will even withhold full levels or future installments of a series unless enough people rate 5 stars. The creator of the game has expressed his disapproval of this practice.

The Game Grumps invoke this as a Running Gag, e.g.: "People from Japan! Please confirm this! Like, subscribe and comment!"

Used quite inexplicably in the fanfic Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami, when the author urges us to "Read my fic! Vote!", with no indication of where to do so or what we are voting for. (Fanfiction.net does not have any sort of voting system, nor was the fic entered as part of a contest.)

Examples of Please Donate:

At times Wikipedia has banners that lead to pages with "personal appeals" explaining that they need donations to keep the servers running, etc. Parodies ensued.

NPR and the PBS are publicly funded and will occasionally go into "pledge drives" where they will beg for viewers to donate between segments, often with promises of tote bags to sweeten the deal.

Fred Gallagher of MegaTokyo takes pride in having averted this trope even during the hard times when he was paying for the bandwidth out of pocket.

Blind Ferret Enterprises, the business developed for producing Least I Could Do and Looking for Group, founder Ryan Sohmer is viciously against this. Whenever he comments about webcomics in general or tries to give advice to people wanting to make webcomics, this is one of the first 'don'ts' on his list, right after 'fail to update when you promise to'. Sohmer does, however, post about his various Kickstarter projects in the News Post section.

Animemusicvideos used to have a particularly invasive manner of requesting donations. While the site was displayed, it would randomly pull up a screen asking for donations, then at the bottom of this screen there were three buttons, one of these buttons would say something like 'continue', and the two others would say 'donate'. These buttons would be randomly swapped every time the screen pops up, forcing you to either pay attention or risk mistakenly hitting the 'donate' button.

In The Wotch, their donation meter is invariably one of the main cast being transformed into a woman. The more money is donated, the more of the character's body is transformed.

Faux Pas has a little icon of a dog dish labeled "Randy" (the name of the fox main character) which links to a donation site.

Kingdom of Loathing has a "please donate" plea from the creator on its front page, as well as a link to the donation form in the top tray (using the icon menu display option). Of course, considering donating enough money earns you a Mr. Accessory (which are tradeable for special in-game items), this could just be for the convenience of speedrunners and/or people after the Item of the Month.

Gerald Day, a British creator of low-polygon Poser content, asks for PayPal donations of £1 or US$1.50 from Poser artists who use his free items.

Mr Deity has attached to the end of each episode a clip of the creator rather shamelessly begging for donations. The clips are hilarious and have gotten increasingly elaborate over the years; the ones for season 3 form a mini-storyarc.

Developers of custom Android firmware very frequently include donate links next to the download links for booze or coffee.

The makers of Super Mario Bros. Crossover already ran a successful Kickstarter funding for their Super Action Squad project, but are now asking for more donations so they can devote more time to developing it. There's a meter below the game's main menu showing how much they raised and how much they need, between which there is a big gap.

World War II: The series was announced with a Kickstarter campaign and pre-production and the construction of their own small studio was accomplished as a result of that success. At the end of every episode, Indy asks the viewers to join the TimeGhost Army by subscribing and supporting them on their ongoing crowdfunding campaigns.

A lot of online artists will usually ask their watchers or fans to donate in order to be able to produce more quality art and to feed themselves. Some artists may just straight up ask for donations while others may use things like Patreon to let people donate monthly while giving rewards back in return.

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